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Notes
The movement is usually seen as having been founded at a conference at Goldsmith’s, London, in April, 2007, at which Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux presented talks. Since then, it has been widely pursued—both by adherents and detractors—in various internet fora. For some well-placed doubts, both about the actuality of the (so-called) “movement” and about the circumstances of its development on the web (by one of its putative founders) see Brassier (2011) [quoted in Gratton (2014, p. 3)].
Thus, several commentators have argued that its central and motivating critique of “correlationism”—defined by Meillassoux in Meillassoux (2008) as the claim that one can only understand the relationship between thinking and being by means of an analysis of our “access” to it—is misapplied with respect to many or perhaps even most of the historical philosophers against whom Meillassoux and others wield it. For versions of this criticism, see, e.g., Hallward (2008), Livingston (2013), and Gratton (2014, pp. 46–52). For a contrasting interpretation of a variety of post-Kantian continental philosophers as essentially committed to anti-realist positions, see Braver (2007).
Another interesting consequence noted by the translators in their helpful introduction is that being, as the inverse of comprehension, is non-extensional, in the sense that an entity is not defined by what composes it (but rather by the combination of this and what it makes up or enters into).
Quine (1948, p. 32).
Garcia (2013, pp. 17–18).
Wittgenstein (1921), 1.1 (emphasis added).
Wittgenstein (1921), 6.4; 6.41.
I am indebted to Jon Cogburn for this way of putting the question.
For an articulation and defense of this way of taking Heidegger’s project, see Livingston (forthcoming), especially chapter 2.
For instance: “…the world…comprehends all and is comprehended by nothing. Being exists in only one sense.”; “The world is the form of things”; “…we claim that the world is what is not something. Something never is ‘tout court’, any more than something is not ‘tout court’. Something is or is not something. The world is precisely what is not something. The world has no other determination; it is neither material nor spiritual, neither logical nor symbolic, neither metaphysical nor sensible.” The reader familiar with Heidegger’s thought of ontological difference is invited to try the exercise of substituting “being” for “the world” and “entities” for “something” in these passages and others like them.
Deleuze (1968, p. 183).
Indeed, the question of such an orientation is all but explicit in Garcia’s very formulations of the contemporary experience to which the project of the book as a whole responds. If today there are “more and more” objects, how is this increase to be measured (when it is avowedly impossible to count)? If there is a limit to it, where is it to be found? Or if there is not, how can (how should) we understand its motivating factors and underlying determinants? How is a formal and material “mapping” to produce an orientation to what is without limit, thus without discernable boundary or fixed representable totality? Or if it cannot, then (how) can formal considerations indeed nonetheless provide the guidance “we” appear increasingly to need in navigating, situating, and responding to the ever more bewildering variety of things and relations?
Cf. Alain Badiou’s description of the “spontaneous ideology” of what he terms contemporary “democratic materialism” in Logics of Worlds, chapter 1.
As, e.g., in the title and argument of Friedman’s (2005) bestseller, The World is Flat.
For one development of this kind of position, see Livingston (2012), especially chapter 10.
I would like to thank Jon Cogburn for reading and providing invaluable comments on an earlier draft of this review.
References
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Livingston, P. Formal ontology and the flat world: a review of Tristan Garcia’s Form and Object . Cont Philos Rev 49, 545–553 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9402-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9402-4